One of the problems facing many areas is the concentration of population around large metropolitan areas with a significant proportion of the population living in suburban areas. Therefore, a considerable amount of travel by road is required to get to work or to accomplish daily tasks. Furthermore, with the rapid growth of this population, the roads and the transportation infrastructure have invariably lagged behind the explosive growth of vehicles that travel on these roads.
With the roads being congested, a small disturbance in the traffic flow, such as that caused by an accident, can severely impact the travel time on these roads. Therefore, there is a significant need for a commuter to receive timely and pertinent traffic information about the roads on which they may be traveling.
Traffic information is often provided by radio or television broadcasts or by the internet. However, this information is generally not timely and is also generally not specific to a route that a user may want to travel on. For example, a Traffic Messaging Channel (TMC) is broadcast in some European countries and provides real time traffic information via lower frequency radio signals.
However, this and other known traffic/navigation systems generally require either (1) a centralized traffic information service provider, and/or (2) upfront set up by a user to configure a route (for example, on a website) often using specific tools provided by a traffic information service provider. Therefore, such systems are complex and not user friendly since specific tools have to be learned by the users in order to use the systems. Furthermore, the traffic information received by the user may not be timely enough for the user to make use of the information to adjust his route and minimize the travel time to get to his destination.